Late last night Rand emailed me this article about the concerns over Google filtering "good porn" out of their search results. I think it's funny how Google has been, as Danny Sullivan put it, "tweaking porn filters" when their image search results frequently return some serious (and often nas-tay) T&A. Seriously, do a search for stuff like "junk in the trunk," "sex," "brunette," or "blonde," and you'll see a huge disparity in the listed and image results (with "safe search" disabled in both). Bleh. If Google's trying to serve up relevant results that are light on the porn, then they've got a lot of work to do with their image search results. (Uh, by the way, don't do the searches at work if you're in an office that, unlike SEOmoz, doesn't condone gawking at porn.)

Anyway, back to the article. I found this piece to be unintentionally amusing. It talks about the "difficulties of gauging 'good porn,'" which is pretty hilarious. Is there such a thing as "good" vs. "bad" porn? Wouldn't that depend on the searcher's taste? Someone who's into S&M might find bondage porn results to be "good porn," right?

It seems that "good porn" is supposed to be "spam-lite," relevant porn, but the article talks about how erotic and adult industry blogs had been disappearing from search results. Hey Google, where's the porn love? Are you just one big fat prude?

Here's a Venn diagram illustrating Google's stance about their filters:


They maintain that all they're doing is separating the wheat from the shaft, er, chaff. I, however, have a different theory about the disappearing sites. The article mentions that "Google’s [Matt] Cutts was visible in comments he posted on sex blogs," and Matt said that he "worked on Google’s SafeSearch filter years ago," and knows that "distinguishing between the “good porn” sites compared to the “regular porn” sites is a hard problem." Oh really, Matt? Been visiting a lot of sex blogs lately? For "research"? Separating "good" porn from "regular" porn is a "hard" problem?

Here's the real Venn diagram:



He's clearly hoarding sites for himself. Come on, Matt: what you do on your own (and, apparently, Google's) time is one thing, but when you start greedily stockpiling sites for yourself and start keeping them out of search results, innocent erotobloggers like Tony Comstock and Violet Blue are suffering the consequences.

Now for the "Seriously, folks" part. Yeah, it's a bummer that these bloggers' sites either severely dropped in the rankings or disappeared from the results page altogether, but it's not like this has only happened to porn and erotic-related sites. Lots of sites in various industries have experienced the Sandbox Effect, the "oh crap, why did my site drop 30 spots" penalty or some other dip or change in rankings after an algo change, or because they've been naughty (in the nerdy SEO sense, not in an "ooh, I've been bad" sort of way) or fell afoul of a guideline they weren't aware of.

Search engines are constantly tweaking their algorithms, formulas, filters, etc in a perpetually unattainable attempt at returning search results that perfectly match your search query and are super duper relevant. The hard truth (no pun intended this time...well, maybe a little) is that this recent issue was most likely a result of some boring ol' algo tweak, not because Google's on a quest to eroticate eradicate porn. Danny echoes the same sentiments over at Search Engine Land:

Many different things could be going on [referring to both bloggers' sites having problems with non-unique title tags], but for a number of similar sites to be involved, it does suggest that Google was doing some tinkering with the ranking algorithm, especially perhaps parts that deal with adult content.

Perhaps there was indeed some start of this that happened a few weeks ago, and maybe a further tweak just went too far this week. The attention certainly got Google to make some adjustments, so I don't see this as some attempt to wipe out indie adult sites. Not everyone will agree. Some will just assume that after a dose of bad publicity, Google got cold feet. Me, I've seen this thing come and go with various industries and with various individual site, so I'm less into that conspiracy.

Regardless of whether you think Google's doing a great, poor, or unfair job at handling the whole porn issue, you gotta give those Googlers credit for doing their best to communicate with those involved in the porn industry and for addressing issues that get brought to their attention in as timely a manner as they can. It ain't easy being on top (hehe), but Google's doing the best they can with what they got (okay, I really need to stop now).

(And no, I don't actually think Matt's a perv [although it is entertaining to ponder what his porn name would be...after all, "Cutts" does rhyme with "Butts"...])